Ballooning blitz Beneficiary Camp

Spent the past two days at Evergreen primary school for a day camp for children at risk

They are kids with normal abilities, maybe with the exception of one or two.

No learning disabilities, no physical illnesses.

But most of them come from broken family, or families with problems.

Throughout the two days, my observation is that these kids lacked attention at home.

I'm not implying they are attention seeking, but they do not receive as much attention as they ought to have

And when they don't, there's nobody to guide them to make sure they don't veer away from the "right" path

It's these young minds that are malleable and impressionable.

This can be seen especially on the second night when their parents attended session.

The slightly more problematic kids' parents were either not present or stereotypical non-ideal parents!

I hate stereotypes, but the parents I saw fitted the bill of everything you don't want in parents

This P3 boy's Dad and Mum were perpetually on their phone throughout the night.

Did not even bother to appear interested in their child's performance.

At the end of the whole event, they hurriedly left even without taking a group photo together.

Small things like this may be insignificant to them, but to the kids, it's definitely not.

Saw this post on 9GAG which i thought it's funny yet it represents what parents should do.

"If a 3 years old holds up a toy phone to you and goes "RING RING", you put everything down and answer the fucking phone"

Maybe that's too extreme and example, but the gist is parents should shower their kids with appropriate attention regardless how insignificant/useless they might think it is.

Other than some minor conflicts with other camp members, the program went pretty well.

It's one helluva tiring affair though.

Kids are basically virtually hooked on to redbull

Their energy never runs out.

But being a 22 year old (just turned 22 half an hour ago), being energetic the entire day is impossible.

Worst thing was that I was the game master, so i had to inject life into the camp even though I'm innately passive.

One more 3D2N camp coming up in 5 hours time.

Time to sleep.

Oh

I just read the MLM post

The problem with rattling all my thoughts at one go is that I often end up with sentences with missing words.

My hands are too slow for the mind.

And phrases like " many limelights" will appear.

WTF seriously. hahahaha but that's me.

This problem goes way back into primary school and can be seen from all my essays I don't proofread.

Oh well, this is no essay, so fuck it.

Birthday

For the first time, I removed my birthday from facebook.

I'm not trying to do the "see who really remembers my birthday" test

But since i'm going for the camp, I don't want others to know that it's my birthday today.

Saves a lot of birthday songs, and 101 questions about why I'm doing the camp on my birthday.

But so far I've received 3 calls and a few messages, and it really warms me to know that people do remember my birthday and make the effort to call/text at 12.